Porsche Boxster being built by VW

Porsche has announced that, to cope with demand, some Boxsters will be produced at the Osnabruck Volkswagen plant.

This is not the first time that vehicles have been produced for Porsche in the Lower Saxony factory – car bodies were made here for the 356 hardtop coupé in the 1960s and for the Porsche 968 in the 1990s. From 1969 to 1975, over 115,000 Porsche 914s were assembled in Osnabrück.

Also, some of the original Boxster production was farmed out to Valmet in Finland, which also made Saab convertibles on the same production line. I remember visiting this plant some years ago and was very impressed by it.

Back then, this was a regular topic of conversation in the forums – were German-built cars better than the Finnish ones? The former had an ‘S’ in the VIN, the latter a ‘U’. The answer, of course, was that there was no difference – Porsche’s stringent quality control wouldn’t allow there to be. The enthusiast staff at Valmet claimed that they made the better cars but I think that was just their pride in their work talking.

No doubt we’ll start seeing similar discussions about Porsche vs VW built Boxsters but, again, there will be no difference between them.